Black in Public

You are used to seeing wealth on a spectrum, and can see people who are richer than you by a factor of ten and poorer by a factor of ten in the same city. That makes you feel - perhaps rightly - that you are middle class in that you sit in between two starkly different poles. Except really, you aren’t.

What you’re not understanding is the experience of wealth by distribution. The people who live above you are, by income, .01% of the population. The people that live below you? 98%. We may be in “the middle” by how much we have, but we are in the top 2% of Americans by having that much.

Your false conception of being middle class has been shaped by design. The more we understand the “average” (i.e., “middle”) American to be wealthy, the easier it to vilify the poor as “lazy” to justify tax policy that favors the wealthy.

What’re you gonna do with this information? Here are some good ideas:

- Start referring to yourself as part of the 1%, owning it makes shifting your perspective easier.

- Use your economic status to fight politically for higher wages, unions, and wage parity along gender and race.

- Donate more of your income to services that provide for lower income households.

- Show support for tax increases in your tax bracket amongst your peers.